flag mania in germany

daily life

siebzehnter juni

back in germany the first thing to notice was the presence of national flags. “Schwarz Rot Gold” is as omnipresent as the star spangled banner in October 2001 in the US. This time it’s about soccer. Most of the country is delighted that the german team seams to have survived the first round. And that there are three soccer games a day. At a decent time in day.

It’s nice to see this happy kind of flag waving. When I grew up the national flag was something that only pretty right wing people would be seen around. And those are particular disgusting in Germany. There was simply no positive identification with the country.

The 17th of June used to be a holiday: “The day of the german unity”. As long it did not exist the western side devoted one day or mourning and speeches to this thing that we all thought would never be a reality again. It was kind of like a tombstone.

Germans love flags. Not only during those dark days between 33 and 45. The market for advertisement on flags is supposed to be 100 Million Euros a year. (according to the Suedeutsche Zeitung). Commercials in cinemas were 86 Million Euros in 2005. There are easy 20 minutes of commercials before the movie starts.

Der Spiegel writes in its usual way about the flagststyria 2006:
First they find a CDU politician for a stupid quote: “Die ganze Stadt soll ein schwarz-rot-goldenes Fahnenmeer sein.” Basically somebody wanted to make flags mandatory for public buildings until the end of the worldcup.
Then they go on how all those flags are made in China. That not enough will arrive since till the end of the tournament, they claim that aircargo would be too expensive. Then they go on that the car flags that had not been seen in Europe before would be made for 17 cents (too high) and would be sold for 5 US$. They also say that they not really survive the Autobahn. Which is probably true. If they would employ a pocket calculator they could see that even in their way to conservative 30 to margin for something that weights less than 10 grams. it took 3 minutes of googling to find that it would cost you 0.16 US$ to ship those flags to Frankfurt by air. That would explain why there was never any shortage on car flags in the US after 9/11.

find hole in google anti spam rules

internet malware


and you can make north of 180K a month within 3 weeks

Now this one will be hopefullly be victim to his own success. But the principle works of scraped content works, and is rarely documented simply and straight forward. Even though it is that simple: steal and or buy what search engines think is content. Serve it up as many variations as you can and get the engine to swallow it.

It’s interesting that all those super smart phd holders at google never built it in a trigger in their code that would check if a domain would go from zero pages to five billion within 3 weeks. Actually a domain growing by 100,000 pages within a month is supicious. Like blogspot 😉

misc

Joel remembering Bill
now that he quit his day job.

untried, yet interesting
better spotlight interface. We need one. And we would need a ‘Finder’ that is not actually a ‘Looser’ like the current one.
No doesn’t loose files, since it’s not it’s job to keep them. But it’s a pretty bad interface if you ask me. Slow, unintuitive and in total lack of any feature. Rewrite! It feels like 10.0. Without the hope.

no comments on this one

marketing

marketing

happy mornings

sold out

Writing this from the fancy Detroit NWA terminal. A building so long that they have a railroad inside. Flying NWA is not that bad: Their airmiles don’t expire. And if you have enough then you have a pretty good chance to get into first class. (Lufthansa: ever wondered why you haven’t seen me a while?) Interesting how much of corporate America operates on ‘Chapter 11’ these days.

I must omit that I caved in and paid 7.95 for internet access. Compared to how little effort it takes to set up wifi I feel that is horribly overpriced. Interestingly there is only ONE wifi provider at all the airports that I have been two.
I would wonder what would happen, if there would be TWO. I would wonder how cheaps could get. Maybe some of them would even install power outlets. The Terminal here got build only a few years ago. Yet, Poweroutles are spaced for vacuum cleaners. That people have laptops, phones and twelve million other things that might need power has escaped airport planers. It’s easy to produce a ridicolous amount of iPods in China in record time. But adjusting little things like power outlet frequencies seems to take forever.

unrelated:
I gonna miss youTube
too bad they will not survive their next bandwidth bill. Chapter 11?

in the meantime in vapor land

misc

there are people connecting their red camera to Sony PS3s running Windows Vista

Red the camera
it’s internals would perform a couple of miracles if they would deliver on their specifications.
But the redesign is about the case. Great. Keep updating the case. The eletronics are the easy bit. Sure.

Sony PS3
If you make a 1000 chips maybe only 100 work. That’s called yield. In the end it comes down to cost. If you have a very complex chip this can be very tricky to manage. The Cell chips in the PS3 were announced to run at 3.5 Ghz. Rumors see them at 2.8Ghz right now. Which also would help with the heat problems the console will have.

Vista
Some kids have to help Microsoft distributing the OS via Bittorrent. Innovation from the outside.

Robert Scoble used to be ‘the Microsoft Blogger’ and got allot of attention. Technorati ranks him at #22. That probably will fade fast. How long till his tag as the ‘ex Microsoft Blogger’ fades? Much of his attraction was, that he was this voice from within the dark star. Now he is out here with us. In the dust of the milky way. And there are -by god- enough voices out there.

is it the kocevski brothers now?

internet misc

an interesting mashup that will rise to internet fame without a doubt.

the credits mention Dan and Dale Kocevski. No idea if they are indeed brothers.

one lone screen saver

free of any reason

somewhere in America

some IT workers in Sheffield, UK
Aeron chairs are everywhere, it seems.

so easy to waste a Saturday

Apple internet technology

I would need to find out how long it would take to code a couple of things. They happen to be running on a Mac and they would be dealing with moving images. Quicktime comes to mind. It is an OK player. Sure VLC is more flexible for some formats, but everybody has a Quicktime player on a Mac. SideNote: Why is apple so stupid to charge money for they pro Version of Quicktime? Can’t make revenue that would make up for the general annoyance that comes with it. And you don’t become a standard for charging for features like copy paste. Anyhow.

Quicktime development is a whole different nightmare. There are around 2,500 functions. Countless API options. Countless related technologies, and not a single introduction that would make any sense, or compile for that matter. Of course, it’s all there. And ‘all’ is quet literally. Examples that crash XCode. Examples that only run on OS9. Introductions of codes with code snippets where it takes allot of guessing, which era this was valid in.

Most open software projects have much better online documentation than Apple’s Quicktime. It’s a mess. A mess with a messy history. Once things work they might be great. It also probably great if you work for Apple have access at the internal communication paths. But for a 3rd party developer it’s hard to get into this. Specially if the API would be a smart part of you have actually to do.

I will NOT make a living by coding around the Quicktime API in the next years. It’s just a small part of what I have to do.

OpenGL for instance is also just a small part of what I do. But I have no problems there: I get the code, the documentation, and can drag this knowledge along in the projects that I do. Same with databases. But Quicktime is a horrible beast to get started with.

Almost as bad as ‘AppleScript’. But I rather not start writing about that.

color perception

art

nice optical illusion

zodiac on showreel and the conform

confessions of a pixel pusher misc

This article in Showreel describes the technical workflow of the movie I worked on in the last months.
Since it was written a couple of months ago it is missing the online part: The movie actually gets assembled via a perlscript and a database: It reads the Final Cut XML. Asks the operator to load the camera negative LTO3 tapes into the tape robots that it needs. Loads those via all available tape drives and assembles the frames to one stream of dpx files. It takes about 20 hours to assemble a reel for the first time. But it can do unsupervised once the tape robot has the tapes it needs. Changes are faster of course. Only the missing material will be loaded. Doing the actual conform from the disk takes less than 2 minutes. For the last weeks I was watching split screens of on- and offline. Seing all cut’s line up was a very very pleasant thing. I handled terrabytes of data before. Those are worth something as well. But a 85 million dollar movie is a different story. Finding all frames where they should be was a big relief: I never trust anything or anybody. Especially my own code is highly suspioius to me. This paranoia got me my first gray har on this movie. But maybe it was also the reason why the ghost of the digital-movie-disaster landed on another movie, not “Zodiac”. Whatever it was, it worked, and that makes me very happy. Having finished on schedule: Priceless.